Roid revs

I was on 8mg of Dexamethasone twice a day till yesterday, when the dose was halved. Steroids a good things when, like me, you have a swollen brain; they’ve eased my headache considerably, and lessened some of the deficits – in particular the dropping and smashing of more or less anything I tried to pick up or carry.

Steroids are produced by your body naturally, and I would sometimes encounter a patient with an insufficiency. Any stress on the body whether from illness, or trauma, or emotion rapidly becomes a medical emergency for these people because steroids are a part of the chain reaction, also involving adrenaline, in your body’s fight or flight response. It’s the steroid that causes glucose to be released into the blood to fuel the raised heart rate and increased blood flow to the muscles ready for action. If you’re deficient in any part of the chain of hormones in this process, you cannot respond to stress and you die unless you receive steroids artificially.

The effect of steroids then is pretty dramatic I take them at 8am and 1pm and for a couple of hours afterwards I’m wired, but not in a nice way. They’re stress hormones.

My Mum has a little Suzuki Jimny, which lives in her garage at the bottom of a steep driveway. She is very small, and moves like a rocket, hurling herself at everything. I feel like the Jimny revving up on a flight or fight up the driveway.